Quick and Easy BLT Salad

posted by Kalyn Denny on June 23, 2015

When you need a quick lunch or pot-luck salad, this Quick and Easy BLT Salad will hit the spot! And this tasty salad is low-carb, Keto, low-glycemic, gluten-free, dairy-free, and can be Paleo with the right dressing ingredients! Use the Diet-Type Index to find more recipes like this one.

By the time you read this I’ll be headed for Chicago, where I’ll be attending Eat Write Retreat as well as exploring a few Chicago restaurants with my real-life and blogging friend Stephanie. I’m scheduling a few recipes to post while I’m gone, starting with this Quick and Easy BLT Salad that I made recently with Kara. We gobbled up the salad, and both of us loved how much bacon flavor we could get with only a small amount of crumbled bacon. Because, bacon!

And I’m not going to be shy about admitting it, this salad was inspired by the purchase of a package of Kirkland Bacon Crumbles that jumped into my cart at Costco. I don’t eat a lot of bacon, but I’ve learned it doesn’t take much bacon to add great bacon flavor to some recipes, and it’s something I splurge on occasionally. Kirkland Bacon Crumbles are pieces of cooked crumbled bacon that come in a package that needs refrigeration; I wouldn’t use the dried bacon bits for this salad.

Of course, if you’re a bacon purist you’re welcome to cook your own bacon and crumble it for the salad. It won’t be quite as quick and easy if you do that, but the salad will be amazing either way.

You want the flavors well-distributed in the salad, so chop the lettuce fairly small. Wash lettuce (in a salad spinner if you have one) and cut up tomatoes, slice green onions, and measure the bacon crumbles.

Whisk together dressing ingredients (or use your favorite purchased no-sugar vinaigrette.) Toss the lettuce with the dressing, then add the other ingredients and toss again.

If you have garden-fresh tomatoes to make this, the salad will be even better, but even with the early summer cherry tomatoes I used it was amazing!

Low-Carb Diet / Low-Glycemic Diet ? South Beach Diet Suggestions:
This Quick and Easy BLT Salad would be good for low-carb and low-glycemic diets, and personally I’d eat it for the South Beach Diet as well. The South Beach Diet doesn’t recommend bacon because it contains saturated fat, but it doesn’t take a lot of bacon to make this salad and new research is showing that saturated fat is not harmful. If you’re strictly watching carbs, you might want to use less tomatoes because that’s the highest-carb ingredient here.

Nutritional Information?
If you want nutritional information for a recipe, you can sign up for a free membership with Yummly and use the Yum button on my site to save the recipe and see the nutritional information. Another option is entering the recipe into this Recipe Nutrition Analyzer, which will calculate it for you.